Titus Andronicus

Some of the artistic decisions Titus Andronicus have made during their brief history—naming a song "Upon Viewing Brueghel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'," peppering their tracks with extended quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Albert Camus, writing an entire album that loosely conflates one of the most violent naval battles of the Civil War with the ennui of living in suburban New Jersey—might seem like the sorts of moves one would expect from a group naming themselves after a Shakespearean tragedy. But while this New Jersey quintet certainly has its ideas, dismissing them as pretentious is a gross miscalculation.

As anyone that's listened to 2008's The Airing of Grievances or 2010's The Monitor (the aforementioned semi-conceptual album) knows, Titus Andronicus do the musical legacy of their home state proud, infusing the legacy-laden rock-and-roll grandiloquence of Bruce Springsteen with an infectious punk rock fervor that's been part of Jersey's musical DNA since The Misfits first put on corpsepaint. And just like The Boss, Titus offers big tales of regular folk trying to find their way in the world, with frontman Patrick Stickles shouting out these stories with a voice that another notable New Jersey artist—poet Walt Whitman—would aptly describe as a "barbaric yawp."

When Titus plays out, the group's grandeur and fervor is amplified, transforming already-larger-than-life tunes like "Titus Andronicus Forever" and "Four Score And Seven" into universal rallying cries that can turn the largest rooms into teeming VFW halls. At one point, the band would famously fill off-days during tours with shows at whatever place would have them, be it a hole-in-the-wall joint or the basement of someone's house. At the rate things are going, there aren't going to be many venues around that will be able to contain Titus Andronicus. —David Raposa